JULY 2022 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate Nominee in Georgia. When Walker began his campaign to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Walker campaign's main task was to play down Walker's history of domestic violence. As the campaign progresses, his handlers have a lot more cleaning up to do, which is not something Republicans are very good at—or, interested in.

Take the following: Walker’s involvement with a company that scammed American veterans (he falsely claimed he founded Patriot Support), his promotion of a scammy-sounding anti-coronavirus spray, his public lies about graduating from the University of Georgia (he even claimed he was in the top 1% of his class), his lying about working in law enforcement (he was an honorary Cobb County deputy, which is like being a junior ranger), his false claim about owning a lucrative chicken processing business, and, after “family man” Walker repeatedly criticized absent fathers in black households, his forced public acknowledged of having fathered two sons and a daughter with whom he is not regularly in contact. Add to this his suspiciously opaque supposed financial disclosures and his recent denial that former President Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, one can only conclude that Walker doesn't know anything about anything.

All right, so Herschel Walker is a liar and a hypocrite, a possible scammer, a political buffoon with a history of domestic abuse and a string of children he has so little involvement with that even his own campaign didn't know they existed. Fine. I think we could have all left it with "if you put a gun to your wife's head, you probably should forever be excluded from the United States Senate" but we're dealing with Republicans who don't blink at plots by a sitting Republican president to get his own vice president assassinated, they're not going to blink at any of this.

The depth of Walker’s ignorance never ceases to amaze. On Sunday, Walker spoke in front of the Hall County Republican Party. The group was small, and the speech revolved mainly around the enemy: China. That’s the country he claims created the COVID-19 virus and is to blame for climate change and a tax increase used to clean up the air.

Straying from his usual stump script, Walker started talking about the environment and climate change and how “[President Joe] Biden” began “getting rid of pipelines,” and “getting rid of our energy.” Then Walker explained climate change and the “Green New Deal” by saying that “We, in America, have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world.” He then pivoted to describe how the U.S. is going to “pull from the ‘Green New Deal’… millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up,” and added that, “China and India aren’t putting anything into cleaning that situation up.”

“So all that bad air is still there. But, since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China bad air. So when China get our good air, their bad air gotta move. So, it moves over to our good air space. And now, we gotta clean that back up. While they’re messing ours up. So, what we’re doing is just spending money. But we’re not just spending money, we’re spending your money,” Walker says. And that is why Biden is raising taxes, he reasons.”

Enlightening!

Earlier in a monthly IGGY, I mentioned that Walker, if elected (the race against Warnock is virtually a dead heat), would be a shoe-in to join Louie Gohmert and Tommy Tuberville as one of the Three Stooge dumbest Congressmen. I’ll bet you could probably get Walker to play quietly in his office for at least an hour by giving him a copy of The Last Supper and telling him to find Waldo.

And now, he may be trying to earn the distinction of not only being a moron, but the Congress’ biggest fabricator, perhaps one of the greatest of all time, only one step behind the Trumpster..

SWEDEN ENDS TWO CENTURIES OF NONALIGNMENT

Sweden has not been involved in foreign wars since 1814. This long, successful record, maintained without the aid of foreign alliances, was instrumental in developing a tradition of neutrality and a general aloofness from active involvement in international affairs. This tradition of aloofness gradually diminished in the years after World War II as Sweden responded to the centripetal pull of European integration and its political, economic and security foreign orientations became increasingly internationalist in both their nature and purposes. Swedes liked to refer to this policy as "active neutrality."  Still, throughout the post-War years Sweden stood steadfast in avoiding military alliances with the aim of remaining neutral in any war.